It's My birthday, Too!

For a number of years I have posted to my blog for my birthday though last year I neglected to do so. I don’t recall the reason for the negligence but when I look back to the postings for the entire 2019 I note that there were no postings from January through October, and so I guess the year did not inspire my attention. Or it depressed me too much to want to address anything about it or me. We did celebrate the birthday that years with my brother and his wife at their home in Connecticut eating roasted corn on the cob from the local Farmer’s market and followed by birthday cupcakes: I ate two and too many. And finished my seventy-second year.

     This year has been difficult. Trump and his sycophants polluted the air with their lies and their vicious discourse and heinous policies. Not only did we (for a fourth year) suffer under a government by tweets from a narcissistically disordered bully who remains ignorant of history and appears seemingly functionally illiterate supported by a Republican party that has abandoned governing from an insistence on justice and equal protection under the law; but that gallops towards a fascism that threatens the very basis of the United States constitution.  Okay, enough of that.

     Then this year there occurred the pandemic: the current iteration of plague. For the past six months we have restructured our lives under the dark clouds of COVID-19 and its deadly mismanagement by the Trump administration. I haven’t engaged in social activity since the second week of March; have abandoned travel plans, eliminated the option to dine in restaurants or imbibe at a local pub; avoided coffee houses and given up my gym membership. I who had spent uncounted joy-filled hours in movie houses have not visited one in six months. I have tickets for an already rescheduled concert that I don’t think will actually occur. I worked for almost fifty years in the schools but what will schools become as the pandemic rages? Who knows when this will end, but regardless of its finish the world will never be the same again. I published in July an article in Prospects addressing what curriculum might offer to the present situation. I entitled the article “After This, Nothing Happened,” quoting Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow Nation who faced the decimation of the Crow subjectivity with the loss of the buffalo but who maintained a radical hope that the Crow would have a future though he could not know of what that future might consist. I cannot imagine the future here but I maintain hope that there will be one for the sake of our children.

     But on this birthday I have decided to address at least what remains in my power to do so. I have grown weary of the quantification of my existence by the technologies now available to do so. I have during the pandemic walked twice a day. I listen to music as I do so but while I walk the iPhone measures the steps and mileage of each effort. And it then reports to me not only today’s effort but then announces how today compares with yesterday and this week with the previous and this month with the past one. And then I become fixated on these numbers such that they begin to control my walking, and what should be pleasant activity becomes onerous. I would learn to saunter. Then there existed the measure of the effort I made on the indoor bicycle: revolutions per minute coupled with effort became quantified into WATTS. I know the measure reported my output of something though I don’t know what exactly. In front of me was the computer monitor that recorded every single second of my effort. And the instructors kept urging me to work harder. Mithridates, I know, well, he died old! When I was a runner I did possess a chronograph that replaced a chronograph and that measured the speed with which I ran, and I measure my runs in mileage, but I didn’t really care what the chronograph said or even the distances I covered: I think that the chronograph was das much a part of the runner’s uniform as were my running shorts and t-shirts. I think they were more significant to me than the information the chronograph reported. And though I ran a specific distance it was the run that mattered and not its quantifiable length. I loved going out more than I did the returning. The pleasure of running was in the effort and not its measure. More: during the pandemic I take my temperature regularly and measure my pulse and oxygen level with the pulse/oximeter. The practice has become compulsive: if I can measure then I should measure. I take my blood pressure and when I don’t like the reported numbers, I take it again though not much changes in 15 minutes. The numbers reporting the Coronavirus appear throughout the day in the newspapers printed and online and I obsessively check them. I look at the poll numbers and pray that this time they are accurate. I am drowning in numbers. 

     I finish my 73^rd year. Another measure but other than the fact that the mileage is fixed and the direction irreversible, I refuse to acknowledge or measure the pace.